You could spend the entire month on
various Elizabethan poets. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Donne, Jonson…the age
doesn’t get more golden as far as English lit goes.
So let’s have Sir Philip Sidney
today. Like Marlowe and Raleigh, Sidney was one of those utility players:
soldier, courtier, poet, politician. He was part of the Dudley family, which put
him in close proximity to Elizabeth, and embarked on diplomatic missions before
he was 20; at the age of 22 he was in Paris and witnessed the Saint Bartholomew
Day Massacre, which must have shaped his already strong Protestant convictions.
By age 25 he wrote an open letter the
Queen detailing why she should not marry the (French Catholic) Duc d’Alençon.
Among his objections was the fact that d’Alençon was a son of Catherine de
Medicis, “the Jezebel of our age”, who of course had been critical to the Saint
Bartholomew Day events of five years earlier. Pretty bold for a young man,
although of course it was a different age, and he’d already paid a lot of dues.
Sidney was as bold a military leader
against Spain as he was a matrimonial advisor. He was wounded at the Battle of
Zutphen. I have to think that the 26 days it took to die from gangrene must
have been ghastly. He was not yet 32 years old.
As a man of letters, Sidney held that
the purpose of poetry is “to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our
degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” He
wrote in a variety of formats. Here’s an example.
“My true love hath my heart”
My true-love hath my heart and I
have his,
By just exchange one for the other
given:
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot
miss;
There never was a bargain better
driven.
His heart in me keeps me and him in
one;
My heart in him his thoughts and
senses guides:
He loves my heart, for once it was
his own;
I cherish his because in me it
bides.
His heart his wound received from my
sight;
My heart was wounded with his
wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did
light,
So still, methought, in me his hurt
did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change
sought our bliss,
My true love hath my heart and I
have his.
1 comment:
OMG, as in, this could cause an orgasm in some people, and nearly in me.
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